Persimmon tastes this year

Scott F Smith(6B/7A MD)November 16, 2012

A recent thread about good/bad (Hachiya/Tannenashi in this case) tasting persimmons reminded me to post how mine did this year.

I have become a big fan of Aizu Mishirazu. It is a small version of Hachiya with a richer and sweeter flavor. It is purported to be a PVA type meaning it has to be pollinated to taste good. This year was the first time it fruited side by side with Hachiya, and it was the clear winner. Chocolate is as flavorful but not as sweet; Aizu wins on the combo of sweetness and flavor.

Hachiya has been biennial for me, either nothing or a ton. This year I am getting a ton of them, I will probably dry them this weekend. They are a very good tasting persimmon. Hardiness is an issue, every 3-4 years I get significant shoot dieback.

Jiro, Fuyu, and Twentieth Century - these guys all taste pretty similar; 20thC is smaller. I thought it was better last year but this year they all taste similar and good. If I let them soften they taste pretty similar to Hachiya but are somewhat stringy in texture. Note that my Fuyu may in fact be a Jiro, they are looking identical in all respects.

Chocolate gave me very few fruits this year, it made too many male flowers. They are not quite ready yet but they are always very tasty, it is now my #2 after Aizu.

I have a few Hyakume, it is a late variety that may in fact be a bit too late for me. Most are still on the tree. I did pick a few and they are going to be ready to eat in a few days.

Overall I am finding them to all be similar in flavor except for Aizu and Chocolate. I like the non-astringents more than I used to because you get the advantage of eating them in the crunchy state, the only way any of my family besides me wants to eat a fresh persimmon.

Scott, its Mrs. G. Last winter I bought a 'Fuyu' persimmon at the supermarket to find out what a persimmon tastes like. I let it ripen (OK its a supermarket fruit!) and cut it in half. I scooped it out like ice cream and it tasted simply like an over sugared pudding. I really could not differeniate a taste. What do good persimmons taste like and why should I grow one. Many thanks, Mrs. G

Have you tried Tam Kam (another PCNA)? They seem mostly on par with fuyu and 20th century flavorwise to me. I had a late freeze here which wiped out all the fresh growth (and thousands of flower buds) from my oldest Tam Kam, but, to my surprise, when it put out its second flush of growth it also included several dozen flowers and so I got a handful of fruits I didn't expect though they were a bit smaller than last year (@ 5 oz. on ave.) Unfortunately, the Yamagaki (I think this is a PVA)decided to flower for the first time (loaded with both male and female flowers), but after the freeze got it, the new growth had no flowers at all.

My native persimmons were especially good this year. Intense flavor.. We had an early Spring followed by a hot record setting drought.. They were even ripe before the first frost. I have a small area where there are about eight trees off to themselves.. anyway they were yummy. About a week after I harvested these I remembered I had another native tree by a pond bank.. It had frosted several times by then.. persimmons were still hanging on this lone tree.. after several almost aerial maneuvers I harvested a few of the most astringent fruit I have ever tried.. bleck.. Interesting to me though was the diffence in the color and number of seeds between the fruit of these different trees..

Other than that I had a Yates.. grown by a friend.. It was very nice.. He said usually he liked the Prok better, but this year Yates was better..

Again, I think our weather changed the flavor.. I saved lots of persimmon seeds to try to germinate in the spring.. Hopefully I will have some seedlings for grafting at a later date..

Mrs. G, Fuyu tastes much better when it is crisp. I made the mistake of leaving mine out too long so they got mushy this year. Hachiya and other PCA types get translucent soft flesh when they are ripe, and are a notch better in flavor. My family still doesn't like them a whole lot, they only like the crisp Fuyu types. I have a counter full of Hachiyas now and I think I will try making jam this year. Overall I would prefer a peach or a plum to a persimmon, but persimmons are so much easier to grow and that makes them valuable in a backyard orchard.

Dave, I am not surprised to hear Tam Kam is similar. All of the PCNA types seem to be similar genetically (they all have the same shape etc). I have not tried that variety. The main difference on the PCNA varieties is ripening time and hardiness.

I tried one of the Hyakume's yesterday, it was good tasting but did not have enough flavor or sweetness. I am thinking my season may be too short - they did not turn deep orange on the tree. We'll see if the ones I left hang come out any better.

Really long persimmon harvest season this year - I began harvesting Sheng 3 months ago and am harvesting Honan Red now. This one doesn't look like much, being smallish and more orange than red. It has a thick skin which adds a little firmness to the consistency. The flavor is impressively sweet and rich, sometimes with slight traces of astringency.

Do you guys find that tree-ripening astringent varieties like Hachiya vs. letting them ripen off tree makes a difference in flavor?

I had a tree-ripened small Saijo fruit and it was simply amazing, was translucent on the tree hanging nice and plump and squishy. It was very liquidy and sweet. I believe my off tree ripened Saijos have not come close to that flavor, but I have a small sample size.

I've never had Hachiya taste close to that intense either. I wonder because if it's because I've just never had a tree-ripened Hachiya...

Thoughts?

BTW I prefer astringent. I don't think the non-astringents ever quite make it to as good flavor. I did enjoy Izu soft this year though and it is a beautiful reddish color. So that'd be my choice for now on the non-astringents, plus its early.

I got to taste test a lot of astringent varieties this year. Here's thoughts on a few of them (sorry for the disorganized order of this post)
Best Astringents:
Kyung San Ban Si- excellent, flat shaped. slightly bigger than Great Wall to take it out of the small category and put in the medium fruit size category. I want one conical astringent and one flat shaped. This is the definite winner for flat shaped astringent. Sheng is good too but personally I don't like the aesthetics of the humps it has. Great Wall is too small. Sung Hui didn't taste as good.

Hachiya- as always excellent.

Giombo- seems slightly smaller than Hachiya, almost a Smith's Best size. Taste is excellent. Giombo was probably picked the most prematurely of all (still yellow in the skin) and when it got soft it still was at least as good as the above. I wonder if it would beat them all if ripened more on the tree.

Saijo- amazing taste tree ripened but so small. It's a persimmon berry. I want to give a chance of letting Hachiya and Giombo tree ripen before I claim they don't taste as good as Saijo.

I also want to make a plug for Rosseyenka. One of my favorites... doesn't get enough love, this is a very different kind of experience but still amazing. Very small fruit, typically seedless, hybrid Asian American--tastes great if let the skin to crinkle. If my kids pop these instead of candy... that would be great.

I harvested Sheng, Saijo and Ichi Kei Kai Jiro this year in MD outside Washington DC. The first two are astringent until ripe; Ichi is non-astringent. The Ichi were not as good this year. Perhaps due to the long, extremely hot and dry summer they were smaller than usual (despite thinning), and they suffered some stinkbug damage, since they ripen relatively early. The Sheng are very large persimmons and IMO tasty. I only got one Saijo this year, the first fruit my plant has produced, but it tasted good too. I plan to use the Saijo for drying, which is one of their traditional uses.

I much prefer the late ripening astringent-until-ripe persimmons, in part because they avoid the onslaught of stinkbugs and squirrels earlier ripening fruit faces.

Scott, I found some information on taste tests conducted by Bill Preston,in Maryland, with results taken over at least a nine year period. With Hachiya being the standard at 10, Aizu Michirazu scored 8.2, Mazugata 8.5, and Pen 8.2. Sheng was 7.5

Thanks for the report. I grafted Aizu, but then lost it. Will do another.
Have you tasted Mazugata and Pen?

Benny, the reason why I have Aizu, Mazugata, and Pen on trial is because of those taste tests. I had to pick from the dozens of varieties at the Wye plantation, and I took those three plus Maru. I have not tasted the other ones yet. Mazugata has been an overly vigorous tree that has been hard to grow in my close planting system. My Pen is young, I had to move it a few years ago. Aizu has been an easy and reliable tree.

I tasted hybrids Rosseyanka and NikitaÃ¯Â¿Â½s Gift. Rosseyanka was loaded with fruits this year, good producer, so many small fruits about 25-40 g. Nikita is slow grower compared to R. and is more susceptible to fruit drop. Nikita is better in taste, very sweet, rich flavour, but I like both varieties. Rosseyanka is more apricot taste, in Nikita s fruit there were traces of walnuts or something like that.

Biomed, as I mentioned above Aizu has been better-tasting for me. It could have something to do with the biennial mode the Hachiya is in, but its fruits are sizing up very well which means to me the tree is not overloaded.

I like Rosseyanka because fruits have firm pulp, not so mushy like other astringent persimmons. Maybe there are some other astringents not so gelatinous, but I did not tasted so many. Hachiya fruits are almost liquid when riped.

persimmonbob - why do you prefer exactly these two varieties? are both cold hardy at least to 0 F or lower?

If I were in milder climate, I would be more into nonastringent varieties. But I am not sure if there are any cold hardy to my area. I would like to grow for example Tam Kam, but not as potted plant. Probably can not withstand temps down to -4 F.

For me k.b.s and Giombo are more than enough as far as taste is concern.K.b.s has been with me for a long time now,and temp's have dip down to -4* for two winters with no damaged. Giombo 's are still under evaleuation.These tree's are all high grafted on native persimmon grown from native seed's,which are allover in my area.I did purchase 6 new varieties from England nursery,and will not know how they perform through this winter.Rio brill...is one of them.Through the years fruits are rated by me this way:The fruits that i keep going to pick and eat are most likely the ones i keep,that way i keep my acrerage as lean as possibly and be able to take care of them better same with my fig's and others.

melikeplants, that is an interesting article, its good to see some PR for PVNA persimmons. Unfortunately the article gets the names a bit mixed up, Chocolate is probably a synonym for the Tsurunoko variety, and Maru (aka "Cinnamon") is a family of varieties with Zengimaru being the most well-known. To complete out the well-known PVNA (brown-fleshed) varieties there is also "Coffeecake" aka Nishimura Wase and "Brown Sugar", aka Hyakume (of which there are three variants, Amagaki, Yomato, and Koshu Hyakume).

Persimmonbob - probably you mean Rojo Brillante, it is spanish the most grown and commercial variety, with big fruits and good taste. By this variety cold hardiness is probably similiar to Hachiya, so this variety should be more suitable to zone 7. But it is only my opinion, better to test it in your conditions, how can handle with frost on native persimmon roostock. In Spain they graft it on lotus persimmon, which is not cold hardy as natives.

Which astringent persimmons varieties have firm pulp when fruits are riped? It s better for me to eat persimmons with well-preserved shape than liquid mush.

Indicente,you are right Rojo Brilliante tree is what i bought and 6 different sions. Sayo is good but giombo is better and larger so that what i prefer to grow. K.b.s. is a large tree so you have to prune and shape them. (modified central leader).
Don't forget most side branches are very brittle and to many fruits will brake with a strong wind.I don't know why i bought more varieties, i probable feel bad just to buy one tree. All in all i have about 20/25 persimmon tree's now maybe more.Afraid to count.

Last year I got 35 fruit. This year it had a lot of flowers, but it dropped most of them, and I only got 12.

With the warm spring, it started growing early, and got a little zapped by frost, so that may have contributed, but there may have been another cause.

I always have vetch growing in the garden, it self seeds reliably. However, this winter was so mild, there was a lot of vetch growing. It started looking pretty unruly, and was climbing up the other plants, smothering the smaller plants. So I cut it down/pulled it out. The big fruit drop happened within a couple weeks of that. Vetch fixes nitrogen, and I cut it down right as it was flowering, when nitrogen reserves in the roots are at their highest. I suspect the decaying roots provided enough nitrogen to the tree to cause fruit drop, as persimmon is well known for that quirk.

So, there's no way to be sure what the cause was, but Tam Kam is not known for biennial bearing AFAIK. We'll see what happens next year, I'm hopeful for a big crop

This was a very good persimmon year for me.
Jiro and Ichi are older trees in my yard (7-8 year old). Fruits were much bigger than previous years and a lot of them. Had to stake branches to prevent damage to the trees. I like Ichi taste better than Jiro, but both are good. I like them when they are still crunchy.
Chocolate and Hana gave me first good crop this yesr. Chocolate tastes great. Hana is similar to Jiro in taste for me. My Saijo, Coffecake and Izu are still young.
Olga

Alex, thanks for your experience with Tam Kam. Do you grow it on native or lotus rootstock? So it seems to be promising hardy non astringent variety in my area. I would like to test it , also Gwang Yang, but there are not available plants in local nurseries yet. Both- Tam Kam and Gwang Yang should be slow growers, fit to my small garden, because I have not enough space for fast growing persimmons like Kyungban. I want to pick fruits from ground like apples on M9 rootstock :-). And as was said before, I prefer crunchy varieties but still looking for practical experience with nonastringents in zone 6.

Sliced and dried my bumper crop of Rosseyanka fruits this year - even when they were softening, they retained their astringency - but dried, they are marvelous. Even my kids, who are not huge persimmon fans, like them.
Keener(alleged to be a hybrid, bred by L.Burbank) dried well too, though too soft to slice, so I just sort of cut 'em in half and squashed 'em a bit. Much better than the NC-10 and Geneva Long fruits that I dried earlier in the season.

Last spring shipment from England nurseries are Shi Na Da,Aizu Micharau,Sharon,Ribes and Great Wall, have no idea what and how they will grow and taste like. Last spring we had a very strong storm and it broke a few growing grafts.

It will be interesting what is left and if they make it through the winter.

Bob,
I love the sugar sweet taste of grocery bought Sharon (Triumph). I usually have to pay around $1.25 per fruit. Very tasty. I hope it grows in your neck of the wood. As I recall the Sharon(Triumph)was chemically treated.

PersimmonBob - let us know later, how your new varieties survived first winter outside. There was a lot of discussion about Shin na da persimmon here, but still practical experience with Shin is missing here. And hardiness is questionable yet. So I will be glad to read your experience later. Never heard anything about variety called Ribes, do you know more?

Lucky_p Huge crop of Rosseyanka fruits this year and I dried some of them traditional way, like do in Japan. Just picked firm orange fruits, peeled off skin, and let fruits hang on rope and to dry up by air in my rooms. They lost 80 % of weight and result was candy of bigger cheery size, sweet, not astringent.

Ribes is a spanish grown variety and sharon is Isreal.England nurseries people know all about it, i just chance it and doubt if they are any better than the ones i already have. About a hour ago i found a overripe Giombo still on the tree,it is just hard to beat,same with k.b.s.

The fruits that i always look forward to are K.B.S. and Giombo,from mid oct to dec.,then i get my fill and be good till next year.

Today I ate ripe Nikita fruits with whipped cream and walnut pieces.It was delicious,fitting together.Quick dessert for your visitors.But I like more to eat fresh fruits,they contain not as many calories as with cream :-) Nikita's fruits are very sweet and not so small.

I just got to sample a few more of Hachiya and Giombo side by side this time without Giombo prepicked too early.

I think Giombo is consistently better, Hachiya varied more fruit to fruit and was in the same flavor quality as Giombo half the time and the other half just a tad off. I take back what I had previously said about Giombo being consistently a tad smaller, some of the later fruit was same size/tad larger. So it is not too different their sizes.

I also tried Shin Na Da and a few others this year. None were as good as the Hachiya, Giombo, KBS trio.

My take is this, first of all astringents all the way. Non-astringents have such a mild flavor comparatively. They are nice but I'm not sure growing your own the flavor changes any.

As for the astringents, I noticed some varieties were much more finicky about when they had to be picked and then when they had to be consumed to avoid a bad flavor (too astringent, soured, bland/not sweet... real experience killers). Hachiya, Giombo, KBS were not finicky at all. Of course if picked and eaten at proper time they will taste optimal, but they would hardly ever taste BAD as the others would. Especially Giombo and KBS, it seemed no matter when they were picked or eaten (of course I don't mean biting into an unripen astringent fruit, I mean if picked unripe they will ripen off tree nicely) they had a great propensity for still tasting great. DL-1-1 and Saijo were other favorites for taste, but again that trio has it all... size, prettiness, flavor, and durable flavor. I really liked Izu too for a non-astringent, though I only ate it soft not hard. Not sure why that one doesn't get more mention especially since it's early and a beautiful red fruit.

Nice post PersianMD2Orchard. I would second your observation that persimmons like Hachiya, Kyungsun Bansi and would add Saijo are not "finicky" - these seem to be easiest and most reliable for producing a quality fruit. Some of the PVNAs are also good that way. I have not tried Giombo - I have a couple of good sized trees but no fruit yet. Another excellent one that I've tried but has not yet fruited is Rojo Brillante.

PersimmonBob, I'm curious how Giombo does for you in 6b. Anyone else have reports on Giombo's long-term survival in zone 7 or colder? JustFruits&Exotics and EdibleLandscaping seem to suggest that it's not as suitable to colder areas as some other non-astringents (like Smith's Best, Sheng, Saijo, KbS.) Has anyone compared Giombo specifically to Smith's Best or Sheng?

Last year I got a lot of persimmons of most of my trees. This year only a few made fruit. They all seem to be biannual.
Saijo is excellent. Another variety that I really enjoyed is a Greek persimmon that came from northern Greece and a local Greek guy grows it in his yard. It's a heavy bearer.
Nikita (Bordovaya Nikitaskaya) is excellent, but seems to be very late.
Here's what I harvested last year.

Cousinfloyd, I had the chance to compare giombo to smith's best and sheng for flavor but I think you meant for cold hardiness. all the big acorn/conical shaped persimmons (hachiya, giombo) are borderline for zone 7, but people get away with it even up in zone 6. i think rootstock makes a bit of difference and grafting it up high if possible helps. not sure if necessary though, in zone 7 you don't have to do anything special just dies back a bit once in a while for some.

i just got some Sharon from Israel yesterday to try I expect it is non-astringent.

This has been a good year for learning more about persimmon varieties from everyone. I don't think I've ever appreciated persimmon this much. I really have to say while some say all persimmon tastes similar/theyre all good, I strongly disagree after this year. 90% of varieties I thought were too finicky on when to pick and how long to ripen but not spoil with no benefit rewarded for being finicky compared to their non-finicky brothers.

My Chocolate persimmon, in a greenhouse, are awful, besides being totally unappetizing in appearance. Hopefully it's a pollination issue. The Chocolate had plenty of male flowers but my pollinator variety, Eureka, didn't have either male or females flowers in this it's 3rd leaf.

The Eureka outside haven't softened, not even one fruit. So today I started drying a few to see how they taste that way.

Hey guys thanks for the advice and encouragement. If you wanted to ruin someone on persimmon just offer one of my Chocolate, they look rotten and don't taste much better. I can't eat them. Hopefully both varieties will bloom in the greenhouse next year.

My outside Eureka planted in 2004 had plenty of male flowers last year. I never noticed any until then and the fruit in 2006-2010 was nearly seedless if memory serves well. Last year the fruit with males had some seeds, 3-4 per fruit. This year I didn't see any males again but may have missed them. The fruit I cut today, only four, had not one seed. So Eureka may have males only some years.

I tasted Saijo few days ago and realized that I like Nikita Ã¯Â¿Â½s fruits more - sweeter, rich flavor and almost the same weight of fruits. Disadvantage of Nikita Ã¯Â¿Â½s fruit are skin cracks on riped fruits after time and therefore storage ability is not so long.

For those looking for things to do with persimmons I thought I would follow up with what I did with all my Hachiyas. I was going to make a big batch of jam but I started cooking it and noticed it was getting more cloudy not more clear. I don't think you can make clear jam with persimmons. Looking at recipes it seems like persimmons make persimmon butter. I decided to instead take the pulp I had and try some other things. I made fruit leather in the dryer which came out very well. I probably over-dried it (20 hrs), the stuff is quite chewy. Last time I dried persimmons they rotted in a month, this stuff won't do that! Making leather required a bit more work than just drying the slices, but it is going to be a lot more popular as leather. I didn't find a lot of interest in my previous batch of dried persimmons in spite of their wonderful taste. I made some ice cream following a recipe on the Dave Wilson website, that came out very good as well. Lastly I made persimmon custard, basically take a custard recipe and add a couple cups of persimmon pulp. That also came out very well. The pulp separated to the top so the top was more persimmon-y and the bottom was pure custard. I just pushed the pulp through a strainer to get out the seeds etc and this gave me little chunks of pulp about the size of the holes on the strainer. To get it to go into the custard more uniformly a food processor on it would probably have helped.

I was pretty impressed with my earlier dried Eureka but didn't much care for the skins on that product. So today cut some up for drying but peeled them first. They dry faster than anything else I've tried. The picture is after just a few hours this afternoon in my sunroom. They already look delicious.

This thread prompted me to give persimmons another try. I think my previous experience was with an under-ripe astringent one, which understandably gave me a bad opinion of them.

I've had them from 3 different sources and while all were called "Fuyu", I've noticed some differences. One which I don't hear much about is the toughness of the skin. The first batch (small size, from Chinatown) which had very tough skin. When chewing, I felt like I was in danger of cutting up my mouth...A 2nd (also from Chinatown) was medium-large and intermediate toughness. A 3rd (large size, from Costco) had tender skin which was barely noticeable, but not as sweet as the 2nd. They aren't as dark an orange either, so they may have been picked earlier. I'm storing them a little longer to see if they sweeten further.

Can anyone comment on which non-astringent persimmons have the thinnest (or most tender) skin? Or is it just a matter of how ripe the fruit was when picked or how it has been stored?

As you can see in the picture above, I cut the skin off Eureka before drying. It's not so bad as to cut your mouth but still better off for my taste. If they get ripe enough the skin is much more tender. But to cut them up for drying they need to be firm and that leaves the skin pretty tough.

Dried the Eureka is very good. I think anyone who likes dried fruit would like these.

I had a Texas grown Fuyu. It was very good but I skinned it after a couple bits. In fact it was good enough that I ordered 9 varieties to plant next month.

I did peel a few and they were much better, but if I'm going to get a tree and have a lot of something, I'd like to just grab it and eat. The impact is compounded by kids who are old enough to want it peeled, but not peel it themselves :)

I don't normally like dried fruit, but, those dried Eureka do look pretty good. If I ever get enough that I can't handle them all, that looks like an interesting option to try.

I never eat the skins on any asian persimmon and I have read that the skin should not be consumed as it might lead to stomach issues. I do usually consume skins on the native American types however since removing from them is near impossible unless put through a food mill.